After years of technical debt, Discord has announced a big change is coming to their username system to make it easier to find the people you want to connect with.
Currently, you have your username followed by a bunch of numbers. It's not an ideal system, as they said themselves, "our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily". So they're changing it to be a bit more like Twitter and other platforms where you have @username instead. You'll still be able to change your display name to whatever you want though.
This is a good time to tell you to join the GamingOnLinux Discord right?
When the change comes in, your username will need to be unique and they said it will roll-out over the coming weeks. You'll get an in-app notification when your time comes to do the change-over. It will take several months for them to get through everyone, so you might be in for a bit of a wait on it.
It will be interesting to see how this system is received. It can easily end up with the same problems other places have, with people impersonating others by nabbing their tag used on another platform. Discord will need to be careful on this, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see them eventually roll out their own verification system too due to this.
What are your thoughts?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Cleaner usernames will be good, however, although there will likely be some people not getting the name they want. This change won't please everyone, for sure.
I just hope 'in app notification' will also work if you only access it via browser?
Display wise, they can do what Battle.net does and only display the first portion of your username until you hover your mouse to reveal the appended numbers. In addition, they can copy what Steam does and allow people to assign nicknames to their friends list.
I don't really use Discord these days (will probably check out the GOL channel soon), but I do deal with large corporate changes. In my experience, people like to have timing of migration in their own control. You need to create a reason for them to want to prioritize it, but avoid hard deadlines if you can.
If Discord cannot support the existing name format and a new format at the time same, then they failed the engineering challenge. Where did all those experts go during Covid? Amazon? The talent pool is turning into a vacuum. I digress.
tags will be taken, all server rooms permissions will need to be (manually) re-applied and you are not going to know who is who for quite some time...
Kimyrielle May 5, 2023
Last edited by Kimyrielle on 5 May 2023 at 4:52 pm UTC
Quoting: KimyrielleAm I the only one actually liking the #1234 system?
Nope, I much prefer it, not to mention how this is going to cause a lot of username squatting and selling. There's a big pushback against this change on places like the Fediverse and Tumblr (1) (2).
Plus, they seem to be working on a (rancid) re-design of the mobile app.
All while still making it against ToS to fix the issue yourself, by making your own client or modifying the proprietary client.
I hope Revolt gains some traction when it's more developed, open and optional self-hosting, while being more approachable than XMPP and Matrix for the less tech-savvy
Philadelphus May 6, 2023
Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe results of this could be . . . discordant.If a certain Cupertino company got involved we could have quite an Apple of Discord on our hands!
Dana Souly May 6, 2023
I'm only in Discord for some games, which i like.
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